A procurement pilot to make it easier for diverse suppliers to tender for construction contracts is already proving a success.

Our Procurement team and the Marae Infrastructure Programme team within Community Facilities ran the first pilot of a ‘Kanohi ki te Kanohi’ (face-to-face) evaluation – a newly developed verbal tendering and evaluation method to make it easier for Māori businesses to bid for a work with Auckland Council.

This is an alternative way of evaluating construction tenders under $1 million, by running verbal evaluation meetings instead of relying solely on extensive written submissions, to select a preferred supplier.

The pilot conducted in April 2022 was for a tender on the upgrade of Whiti Te Ra O Reweti marae in Waimauku. The marae is one of many throughout Tāmaki Makaurau being upgraded as part of a $60 million, 10-year programme with the council in partnership with each marae to improve the condition of 32 marae across the region.

Already the procurement pilot has received great feedback from business users and the tenderers.

“The Kanohi ki te Kanoh verbal tendering process worked exceptionally well for our Māori contractors. The chance to interact face to face allowed knowledge and experience to be shared with a passion and allowed for relationships to be formed at an early stage. Something you just don’t get through a written submission,” says Roslyn Pere-Morriss, Programme Principal, Marae Infrastructure Programme.

Stronghold Group, one of the suppliers who bid on the project, says they valued the opportunity to meet with the procurement team in a 'kanohi ki te kanohi’ setting.

“We felt this gave the council team more of an opportunity to understand who we are as an organisation and some perspective of our business culture and acumen. This process allowed us to share more of our values and strengths that is often lost in translation in a paper-based procurement process.” Whaia te iti kahurangi ki te tuohu koe he maunga teitei (Seek the treasure that you value most dearly, if you bow your head, let it be to a lofty mountain).

We find out more from Chris Leyland, Head of Strategic Procurement how verbal tendering is breaking down the barriers.

How did the idea of verbal tendering come about?
This is something we have talked about with Amotai – Aotearoa’s Supplier Diversity intermediary who help connect Māori and Pasifika businesses with buyers. Often the diverse suppliers we are trying to engage are small family-run businesses, and many of them have no sales or business development staff to help win tenders.

When we are going to market with detailed Requests for Proposals (RFPs) that require a lot of work up front, it’s a real barrier to these companies. An RFP can be up to 50 pages or more and owner/operators have to think if it is worthwhile as it may involve several weekends and evenings worth of their time after hours to complete, and quite a daunting prospect if you’re not a confident writer, especially in the more formal English that these written proposals require. So we thought hard how can we be a customer of choice to smaller construction companies as well as Māori and Pasifika businesses and put ourselves a bit more in their shoes, and think about how we can do things differently.

So that was the key driver – how can we cater better for areas of the market that we know really struggle to find the resource, time and capacity to tender with Auckland Council and in turn bring more diverse suppliers into our business.

While this pilot was designed to be more culturally aligned with te ao Māori to make it easier for small Māori companies to do business with us – it’s showing us that it’s a model that can work well for any small business.

How did you begin?
As a Procurement team, we sat down with Roslyn Pere-Morriss and Aaron Stevenson from the Marae Infrastructure Programme within Community Facilities and thought about how we could do things differently and make the process easier to respond to from a supplier’s perspective, while still getting all of the information we need to make the right decision for the council. And that’s where the concept of Kanohi ki te Kanohi came about. We really stripped back what was required in writing to the bare basics and when we went through everything else, we realised that much of it can be done verbally, which would save the supplier a lot of time.

We also looked at how we could better embrace te ao Māori principles which includes building trust in relationships from the beginning in person, and how we could meet with Māori and Pasifika businesses in a more culturally sensitive way.

This was our first pilot, and I think everyone was surprised at how well it went the first time around. There were other benefits that we didn’t think about at the time. The depth of the responses we got verbally was far greater than if we just had written submissions. We were able to drill into areas of their responses and gain a much better understanding of key project challenges such as working in a Marae setting which would have been hard to evaluate in a written response. It's amazing how much you can pack into an hour interview. You don’t think it’s a long time, but you can cover a lot of ground and gain a much deeper understanding of their capability, relationship with their sub-contractors, and get a better sense of how they will perform on the project than reading a 50-page evaluation. That’s when the whole evaluation team went, “Wow, we’ve really got something here!”

Where to next?
This process has been initially designed to work for construction projects using the low to medium value construction contracts, so we’re hoping to do a few more projects with Community Facilities so we can hone the process and train some additional people.

However I think this methodology could equally lend itself well to other types of tenders we do - particularly where we are engaging with small and mid-size enterprise businesses, community enterprises and Māori and Pasifika organisations. So we will look to expand the scope of ‘Kanohi ki te Kanohi’ with the Legal and Probity teams going forward, and pilot it with some different types of projects.